If you currently use the Performance Management iSeries service, IBM is replacing it with a new set of performance monitoring services that span both IBM i and AIX platforms.

In announcement letter 611-050 from November 15, just after we went on Thanksgiving holiday hiatus at The Four Hundred, IBM replaced the different iSeries and pSeries services with a single, unified Performance Management for Power Systems service. The older Performance Management iSeries service, which was part of IBM's umbrella Operational Support Services, are withdrawn immediately. IBM will support you with the new combined service until your existing contract term comes to an end or if you make a change to the contract terms of coverage; those with pSeries performance monitoring will only get support contracts through April 15, 2012, and must renegotiate their performance management services contracts. The old services had hardcopy and electronic reporting options, the new ones only have electronic reporting.

IBM has a slew of information available describing the ins and outs of the PM for Power Systems service, which you can read about here, but the one thing you can't get is a price for the service. The service puts a PM for Power Systems agent on your machine, which monitors all aspects of performance on the box, but you don't have to have a license to IBM's Performance Tools for the Power-based machines to make use of the service. In fact, the whole point of the service is to grant IBM's techies access to your machine through the software agent and let IBM crank out the reports of relevant performance characteristics that it thinks you need to better run your server iron and its applications.

If you have a mix of AIX and IBM i on the box, one contract covers you. IBM did not say what the deal was with performance monitoring and reporting on Linux partitions on Power Systems iron. The data gathered with PM for Power Systems can be fed into IBM's Work Load Estimator (WLE) capacity planning tool, which is used by customers and sales reps alike to size systems and upgrades for Power iron.

The new converged PM for Power Systems service is available as of November 15.